Adults behaving badly..

Tumie Modise | Monday March 27, 2017 17:30

You know that feeling when someone makes a very bad speech and you grind your teeth because it feels like you are the one doing that, and you are silently praying that they stop? It felt like that. The clip ended after what felt like eternity, but not before more expletives were hurled.

After seeing debates on this hot topic on social media last week, I just had to find this video clip. At first I was not interested; it is only after I heard that minors were involved that I took interest. If ever there was justification for the saying; age isn’t always proportional to maturity, this was it. Growing more than a meter tall, storing excess fat in all the wrong places of your body with a big mouth to match doesn’t necessarily mean you are an adult and that you have wisdom.

Often adults have disagreements. Sometimes tempers flare up, tables fly, fists and kicks in the air and if you are from my side of the hood or share my DNA, plates and pans fly too and in worse case scenarios, knives come out too.

Whenever grownups behave in an inappropriate manner, ghetto or trailer park trash fashion as some call it, it is easy to tell that there they may not exactly be in control of their faculties, especially the one up their heads. Such people often act macho or just downright crazy and when they are on that trance, they are likely not to listen to anyone but their tempers. Reasoning escapes them. I am sure most of us have been on that crazy tip before.

How you handle situations defines you. Once I attended an anger management class some years ago. I did not even know it was an anger management class. What had happened was, we were randomly picked at work and like lambs to the slaughter, sent to this ‘seminar’ as part of the wellness week activities or whatever that was.

One minute we were in this class, listening to this person in front of us, going on and on. I was bored. Next minute a boy, he must have been in his early teens, stormed inside the room and without even a ‘hello’, started pelting all of us with oranges! I thought I was dreaming! There were about ten of us in that room; four males and six females. When that teen left the room, he was limping, saved from certain death by the instructor. You just don’t play like that.

Goes without saying that we failed the course that day. We did not anticipate that the practical part of the course would come that soon, or that it would be in the form of Orange missiles but yes, as grownups we failed to react to that particular situation, in fact, we created another situation out of it!

The ability to study one’s environment, adapt to it, identify and manage not only your own emotions, but those of other people, is what emotional intelligence really is.  Most people, especially grownups lack this. Somewhere there at this neighbouring country, two grownups, a man and a woman demonstrated to the world (and their children) that day, how lack of emotional intelligence is as dangerous as having a crazy person in a nuclear station control room.

When you watch that video, you keep thinking you are watching a bad Chinese movie script, only it is not. On that afternoon, it looked like a weekend, these two adults somehow found themselves at this same eatery.

What they didn’t know (I doubt their actions were pre-meditated), was that by the end of that day they would have made complete fools of themselves in front of the whole world and broke the internet. Lack of intelligence does that.

Two adults, a man and a woman swearing at each other using bad English in a restaurant full of people, young and old, can best be described as stupidity. The other grownups in there were not exactly the brightest light bulbs in that room too that day. For close to ten minutes they watched the embarrassing spectacle and did nothing.

Having emotional intelligence means you are able to study situations, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately as well as use that information to guide your own thinking and behavior. Had those two done that, they wouldn’t be famous today. But then again, maybe its fame they wanted.